About Me

Monday, June 30, 2014

Last night’s TV “feature” was an episode of the British TV
show Endeavour, an intriguing BBC
production set in 1966 and dealing with the youth of the popular character Inspector Morse — and in
case you were wondering why such a show would be called Endeavour, that’s Inspector Morse’s first name. I’ve only
sporadically watched the later shows featuring the older Morse, a homicide
detective in Oxford, England who’s depicted as a recovering alcoholic with a
bug for opera in general and Wagner in particular (though his younger self as
depicted here seems to listen only to Italian operas — I recognized Bellini’s I Puritani and Verdi’s La Traviata) and a rather dyspeptic approach to crime-solving: I
wonder if Michael Connelly was inspired to create his character of Harry Bosch by Morse. Anyway, this
episode was called “Trove” and featured the Oxford police being confronted by a
variety of crimes: a paintball attack with a starter’s pistol in the middle of
a parade in which the victim was its guest of honor, “Miss Great Britain”
a.k.a. Diana Day (Jessica Ellerby); a body falling from a roof on top of an
Anglia (a singularly ugly but serviceable compact car made for the British
market by the U.K. branch of Ford); the mysterious disappearance of a young
girl, Frida Yelland, and the understandable upset of her dad, Bernard Yelland
(Philip Martin Brown), who thinks she was murdered; and the theft of priceless
antiquities from the Oxford museum, three relics of King Harold — the last
Saxon king of England who was dethroned and killed by William the Conqueror at
Hastings in 1066 (and all that) — a loss that hits the university hard because
they were about to exhibit the items as the centerpiece of a 900th
anniversary celebration of the battle.

Morse — played to perfection by
attractive young actor Shaun Evans even though he doesn’t really seem like he’s
going to grow up to be John Thaw, who played the middle-aged dyspeptic Morse in
the BBC’s earlier (and still running) series about him — insists that all these
crimes are linked despite the insistence of his superiors that they’re all
separate and distinct. As things turn out, the theft of the trove of
antiquities from Hastings (which gives the episode its title) is distinct from the others — it was committed by a
couple of Oxford students (both male, though the show is set at the time when
the great universities of both Britain and the U.S. were finally starting to admit women) interested only in the
financial gain from them — but the others are linked. The paintball attack on “Miss Great Britain”
was committed by Kitty Batten (Jessie Buckley) as a feminist gesture to
highlight that there’s more women can do than just win beauty pageants. Her
mother Barbara (Beth Goddard) has been drafted to run for Parliament by the
Labour Party in a by-election (what the Brits call a special election) to
replace a member who died nine months after the regular election (and one
reason Kitty was so upset at the “Miss Great Britain” pageant was that she felt
if there weren’t a glass ceiling her mom would have been the candidate in the
regular election in the first place). Her father Archie (Jonathan Coy) seems to
be odd man out on the campaign trail even though Barbara’s chief concerns seem
to be that neither her husband nor her daughter do anything else to embarrass
her and jeopardize her chances of winning the election.

The man who fell out of
the window onto the Anglia car — whom the older police at first thought had
committed suicide — was Pettifer (Nathan John Carter), a petty blackmailer who
was eliminated by [spoiler alert!]
Archie Batten, who had had an affair with Frida Yelland before realizing that
the Yellands were only her foster parents and she was in fact Archie’s daughter
from a previous relationship. Horrified at what the accusation of incest will
do both to his own career and his wife’s chances in the election, Archie teamed
up with the promoter of the “Miss Great Britain” contest and its feeder
contests to cover up the incident, even if that meant knocking off Frida and
also Pettifer when he got wind of the truth and started blackmailing him about
it. The episode was compelling and genuinely suspenseful — a lot of these
ultra-polite British mystery stories aren’t — and though nowhere nearly as
interesting a character as the older Morse, the young Morse is still a lot of
fun to watch (and not only because Shaun Evans is nice to look at, even when he
gets beaten up by thugs hired by the promoter because he’s getting too close to
the truth and, like Jack Nicholson in Chinatown, has to go through most of the later stages of the
show with bandages or fresh scars on his face) and the writer, Russell Lewis
(who gets credit for having “devised” the show based on the character of the
older Morse as created by Colin Dexter), deserves credit for throwing enough
intriguing red herrings (including a professor of medieval history at Oxford
whom Morse briefly suspects) at us before giving us the real solution (which I
must say I didn’t see coming!). It also helps that the Black (should I call her
“African-British”?) maid who lives in the same apartment building as Morse and
helps nurse him back to health after he’s beaten is played by a fine actress of
African descent who has mastered the Queen’s English well enough to pronounce
the “t” in “often.”

Sunday, June 29, 2014

Last night’s movie was a Lifetime “world premiere” called Outlaw
Prophet: Warren Jeffs, a sure-fire exploitation
topic — let’s face it, the Mormon doctrine of “plural marriage” (polygamy) has
been grist for the pop-culture mill ever since Joseph Smith first proclaimed it
in 1843, a year before he was lynched — and one that Lifetime and its
contributing producers have already milked in productions such as Escape
from Polygamy (2013), which grafted an
offtake of Romeo and Juliet onto
a polygamy story drawing on the real-life cults of Ervil LeBaron (whose
murderous reign had already been the subject of an NBC TV-movie called Prophet
of Evil in 1993, 12 years after his death
in prison) as well as Warren Jeffs and his dad Rulon. Lifetime helpfully
followed the dramatized version of the Warren Jeffs story with a Behind
the Headlines episode about the real one,
which cleared up some points the movie left annoyingly ambiguous and also
corrected some factual errors. There are many conceivable “takes” with which
one could have approached the Warren Jeffs story for a film, but director
Gabriel Range and his writing committee (which included Alyson Evans, Bryce
Kass, Steve Kornacki, Art Monterastelli and Range himself, all based on a book
called When Men Become Gods by
Stephen Singular — who was also interviewed for the Behind the
Headlines documentary) decided to go all
out for the Gothic and turn it into practically a horror film. Warren Jeffs was
the One True Prophet of a breakaway Mormon sect called the Fundamentalist
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, or FLDS for short, which got
started in 1890 when U.S. troops massed on the borders of Utah, prepared to
invade and occupy the Utah Territory if the Mormons didn’t give up their
church’s sanction of polygamy. William Woodruff, the fourth Prophet, Seer and
Revelator of the church, got the message loud and clear and issued a revelation
that God no longer sanctioned “plural marriage” and it was time for the church
to end the practice.

Several breakaway sects left Utah and hid out in even more
remote areas on the not illogical ground that it was wrong to give up a central
tenet of their religion simply because the federal government in Washington,
D.C. didn’t like it. The FLDS was one of these (though it probably didn’t have
that name originally — the term “Fundamentalist” as a name for an especially
strict religious movement didn’t come into common use until 1910, when brothers
Milton and Lyman Stewart published a series of books called The
Fundamentals, in which they decreed what
they thought were the essential doctrines of Protestant Christianity, including
the belief in the inerrancy of the Bible and the historical reality of the New
Testament accounts of Jesus’s birth from a virgin, the miracles and the
resurrection), and by the early 1950’s it was governed by a man named Rulon
Jeffs. In 1953 the federal government staged a raid on Rulon Jeffs’ compound,
which straddled the Utah-Arizona state line and was known as Colorado City in
Utah and Hildale (only one “l”) in Arizona, the whole being located in an area
called Short Creek sufficiently close to Monument Valley that the famous
elevated mesa that featured prominently in so many John Ford Westerns was
clearly visible in the long-shots of this film. The purpose of the raid was to
bust the Jeffs compound and its residents for tax fraud, welfare fraud and the
forcible marriage of underage women to middle-aged men — but the feds got a
major public backlash. People in the area, even ones who were either mainstream
Christians or mainstream Mormons and wouldn’t have dreamed of a polygamous
lifestyle themselves nonetheless rallied around the poor FLDS members who were
being harassed just because they were living their religious beliefs. The FLDS
prospered and managed to infiltrate their own people into local law enforcement
just in case anyone got any damn-fool notions about trying to bust them again.

There matters stood for nearly 50 years until Rulon Jeffs (played in the film
by Martin Landau in what’s probably his best acting opportunity since his role
as Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood) got
deathly ill; according to the movie, at least, he intended Noah Fielding (David
Grant Wright) to be his successor as head of the FLDS. But he made the mistake
of communicating this instruction to Warren, and instead of going along with
his dad’s dying wish Warren took over the cult himself, married all but two of
his father’s 19 wives and began a practice hitherto unknown in the cult of
“reassigning” women to other husbands as a punishment for men he considered
disobedient. He was finally brought down by a determined local sheriff’s
deputy, Gary Engels (David Keith, who looks strikingly like the real one we see
in the documentary), who put the FLDS compound under personal surveillance and
waited for victims to emerge and be willing to testify against Jeffs. It took
him years, but he finally found them in Rebecca Musser (Sabina Gadecki) and her
sister, Elissa Hall, whom Jeffs married off to her 19-year-old first cousin
Allen Steed (Will Buchanan) in 2001 when she was just 14, while Rulon Jeffs was
still alive (Elissa appealed to Rulon to block the marriage, but he was too
sick to do so). Married without her consent, she was repeatedly raped — and
eventually Warren Jeffs was prosecuted in Utah for being an accomplice to
statutory rape in connection with his forcing underage girls to “marry” adult
men. Though the film really doesn’t go into this much, one of Warren Jeffs’
tactics was to expel large numbers of teenage males from the compound for no
other reason than that they were
teenage males, and therefore if he left them around the teenage females might
get involved with them instead of the middle-aged codgers to whom Warren Jeffs
was parceling them out as rewards for loyalty and services rendered. They
became known as the “Lost Boys,” congregated in communities near the FLDS
compound but not under its control, and tried as best as they could to live in
a world they hadn’t been equipped to handle.

It seems that one thing Warren
Jeffs was opposed to was education; though he organized his minions to vote in
Colorado City school board elections and take over the school district in 2002,
shortly thereafter he decided that all his followers’ kids should be
home-schooled and pulled them out — thereby plummeting the enrollment of
Colorado City’s K-12 program from over 1,000 to just 250. As a result, both men
and women who either got kicked out of the cult or left it themselves had literally no idea how to make it in the outside world:
supermarkets were terra incognita
to them, and so were banks. What’s more, since the compound supported itself by
farming and mostly eschewed modern farm equipment, they were turned out without
any salable skills in the outside job market. The film tells this story with an
actor playing Warren Jeffs, Tony Goldwyn, who’s considerably more attractive
and charismatic than the real one (but then quite a few cult leaders, including
Charles Manson and David Koresh, have succeeded even though they didn’t seem to
be especially charismatic to those outside their cults) — indeed, the first we
see of him shows him sitting in his bedroom, wearing just a T-shirt and
underwear, wielding a gun and holding it between his legs (a classically
phallic image evoking Freud’s ironic comparison of a penis and a gun as similar
objects with opposite functions — a penis is a long, cylindrical object that
shoots things which create life, and a gun is a long, cylindrical object that
shoots things which destroy it), getting ready to flee because he’s been tipped
that the compound is about to be raided and he is about to be arrested.
Actually Warren Jeffs was prosecuted twice, once in Utah and once in Texas — the Utah case was dismissed on a
technicality but in the meantime police and prosecutors in Texas had staged a
raid on his satellite compound, YFZ (“Yearning for Zion”), and had found
documents including photos and “marriage licenses” indicating that Jeffs had
not only helped other people “marry” underage girls but had had relations with
underage girls himself (and according to some allegations, not just girls; as
early as the 1980’s Jeffs is supposed to have raped two of his nephews, one of
whom committed suicide after filing his complaint; the other, Brent Jeffs,
testified against Warren at his trial in Texas even though the specific crimes
he was charged with were exclusively heterosexual).

Jeffs was finally convicted
in August 2011 and sentenced to life plus 20 years — he won’t be eligible for
parole until 2038, when if he survives he’ll be 83 — but he’s regularly visited
in prison by his brother Lyle and gives the community marching orders, so he’s
still running it from behind bars. Director Range goes for some of the obvious
titillation this material lends itself to, but mostly shoots the film in a
neo-Gothic vein, full of doomy music by Tony Morales and chiaroscuro cinematography that makes Warren Jeffs almost a
super-villain, a man with uncanny abilities to evade the law and dominate
others. Oddly, the film also makes the Jeffs compound(s) look considerably
grungier than the appear in the documentary, where they were dominated by large
church buildings designed in frank imitation of the mainstream Mormon temples.
Overall, Outlaw Prophet: Warren Jeffs (the first dramatic film about him, though his Wikipedia page lists at
least four previous documentaries) is a somewhat better-than-average Lifetime
movie, powered by Range’s atmospheric direction and Tony Goldwyn’s powerful
performance in the lead — you really get the idea of why the people in this
community, especially those who (because of how long the community had lasted)
had been born and raised into it and literally knew nothing about the outside world other than it
was all ruled by Satan and therefore not something they should venture into,
could have believed that this man was in direct communication with, and getting
his marching orders from, God. It’s even harder to believe when you watch the Behind
the Headlines documentary and realize how
ridiculously nerdy, twerpy and uncharismatic the real Warren Jeffs looked —
obviously it was more his lineage and his cunning than his own appeal as a
leader that kept him in control so long!

Saturday, June 28, 2014

I ran a movie I’d recently
recorded off TCM, Step by Step, a 1946 film that when I first saw it in the TCM listings I assumed was
a Monogram production because it reunited the two stars from Monogram’s 1945
film Dillinger, Lawrence Tierney and Anne
Jeffreys, and its director, Phil Rosen, was also a Monogram “regular.”
Surprise: it was actually made at RKO — Rosen, who’d made one of the two
best films of his career, Dangerous Corner, at RKO a decade before[1]
probably regarded the assignment as a welcome relief from the Monogram salt
mines — and enough of RKO’s standard personnel (producer Sid Rogell, composer
Paul Sawtell, musical director C. Bakaleinikoff, art directors Albert
D’Agostino and Walter E. Keller, set decorators Claude Carpenter and Darrell
Silvera) are in the behind-the-camera credits that it’s clear RKO produced this
film itself and didn’t simply buy a finished negative from Monogram — even
though the “original” story (quotes definitely appropriate!) is by another Monogram regular,
George Callahan (author of most of the Charlie Chan films made at Monogram),
though the script is by the slightly more prestigious Stuart Palmer. RKO had
already lucked into “their Bogart” with the surprise success of Murder, My
Sweet (1944), which transformed
Dick Powell from 1930’s musical star to 1940’s tough guy, but they were looking
for similar actors who could also play tough roles, and they found them in
Robert Mitchum (who’d been kicking around Hollywood for about five years when
he landed the part in United Artists’ The Story of G.I. Joe that made him a star) and Lawrence Tierney.

They
grabbed Tierney from Monogram after the success of Dillinger and started giving him a buildup, only Tierney was
as much a tough guy off screen
as on and his career trailed off into a series of tabloid scandals in which
he’d continually start fights in bars, get arrested and embarrass the hell out
of the studio. Basically Step by Step is a knock-off of Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes, only set in an old Gothic house instead of on a
train. Secretary Evelyn Smith (Anne Jeffreys) has come out to the house to work
for Senator Remmy (Harry Harvey), who wants her to transcribe a list of German
agents being dictated to him by James Blackton (Addison Richards) — only Blackton
notices a microphone dangling from just outside his hotel window, decides it
isn’t safe to give the list out over the phone, and tells Senator Remmy he’ll
come out west (this is one classic-era film that was not only shot in Los
Angeles but actually takes place there) and give him the list in person. The
conceit in the Callahan-Palmer script is that the German High Command has
remained in overall power despite having lost two world wars and is still meeting and actively
planning to regroup and have another “go” at conquering the world. There was
quite a bit of this sort of propaganda during the latter stages of World War II
(one remembers The High Command, a bonus item on Kino on Video’s DVD of Erich von Stroheim’s Blind
Husbands, which was based on the
same idea as this movie: that the Prussian High Command had been intact at
least since Bismarck’s time and they regarded military defeats as just minor
setbacks from which they would recover), and Charles was amused that when Step
by Step was made the Zeitgeist was still worrying about Germany, not the Soviet
Union, being the dastardly evil country that was out to rule the world by
force.

Anyway, Remmy sends Evelyn out because he won’t be needing her after all
until Blackton actually arrives, and says he has bathing suits available so she
can dress in one and swim at the beach. She does this, and while she’s doing so
she’s spotted by Johnny Christopher (Lawrence Tierney), who instantly falls in
lust with her, strips down to swim trunks himself (and turns out to be a nice
hunk of man-meat and even gets to show a little chest hair — the studios were
lightening up after the 1930’s, when on the rare occasions a man got to show
his chest on screen either he was naturally hairless or he was required to
shave his body hair) and goes out to cruise her. Only when he gets back he
finds he’s locked himself out of his car — his only companion is a wire-haired
terrier (at least I think that’s the sort of dog represented) who, like quite a few members of
his species, out-acts the human performers. Johnny gets a ticket from an
obnoxious cop and takes Evelyn back to the house — only everyone else in it is
different: there’s a new person posing as Sen. Remmy, Bruckner (Jason Robards,
Sr.), as well as a vaguely British-accented German named Von Dorn (Lowell
Gilmore) and Gretchen (Myrna Dell), a horse-faced woman who says she is Evelyn Smith. These three overpowered and
knocked out the real Senator and Norton (Phil Warren), the Senator’s chauffeur,
and took over from them, knocked off Blackton and are now looking for his
secret list of the German High Command’s 200 co-conspirators worldwide (which
they don’t know, but we do, he
typed on a torn ribbon of bedsheet and concealed inside the lining of his
leather jacket). The cop accepts the phony Senator and Evelyn as the real deals
and threatens to take Johnny to a mental institution, but eventually Johnny and
Evelyn escape and hide out in a seaside motel owned by Captain Caleb Simpson (a
very Will Geer-ish performance by George Cleveland). Since he needed more
clothes, Johnny took a pair of Norton’s pants and put on the leather jacket
that, unbeknownst to him, contains the secret information. Suspected by the
police of Blackton’s murder, and also being pursued by the bad guys, Johnny and
Evelyn realize they have to solve the crime themselves. What they don’t know is
that the bad guys are also staying at the motel, and they come close to discovering the leather
jacket when the captain buries it, along with some fish, and Johnny’s dog digs
it up.

Johnny and Evelyn become convinced that the chauffeur Norton was
involved in Blackton’s murder, and Johnny roughs him up — ironically, Phil
Warren was actually sexier than Lawrence Tierney but gets knocked off all too
quickly after one of the baddies sees him and Johnny fighting and fires at him
through an open window, killing Norton and setting Johnny up for murder number
two — providing the fisticuffs that people going to see a Lawrence Tierney
movie expected to see. It all ends as it should, of course, with the cops
rescuing Johnny and Evelyn in time and a federal agent exonerating them and
recovering the secret list from inside the jacket. Step by Step is one of those movies that isn’t exactly fresh
entertainment — it’s hard to keep track of how many earlier, better films it
borrows from (including an odd self-plagiarism from Rosen’s Dangerous Corner in which Johnny steals a tube out of Captain
Simpson’s radio so Simpson can’t hear the police description of him and turn
him in; in Dangerous Corner a burned-out radio tube forces the guests at a weekend retreat to talk
to each other, and their secrets — particularly their illicit sexual couplings
with each other — come out; then the story is repeated but with a replacement
on hand for the burned-out tube and with the secrets thereby staying secret) —
but it’s fun, it’s filmed by Rosen and cinematographer Frank Redman in a quasi-noir style even though the script features good-good
guys and bad-bad guys with very little of the moral ambiguity of true noir, and it offers Lawrence Tierney a role that fits
his limited acting skills without making him actively unpleasant to watch the
way he was as an out-and-out psycho in Born to Kill. It also leaves one mourning that Anne Jeffreys
didn’t have more of a career; she was one of those not-quite stars who made
enough films to show off her considerable talents without ever getting the
chance she deserved to make it to the “A”-list.

[1]— His other good one was The Phantom Broadcast, made for the first — and decidedly more interesting
— iteration of Monogram in 1933.

Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Last night I watched a quite powerful documentary, Freedom
Summer, on the PBS American
Experience series, dealing with the
Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964 — a high-stakes venture of the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which at that time still
represented the Left wing of the mainstream African-American (a term that
hadn’t been coined yet) civil rights movement before it broke off two years
later and became the home of the “Black Power” racial nationalists. Back in
1964 SNCC’s logo was a Black arm and a white arm holding each other’s hands — a
visual representation of what the late Michael Harrington called the “Beloved
Community” of Black and white activists that together he hoped would transform
the country. Freedom Summer was a three-pronged offensive against entrenched
racism in Mississippi, whose population in the 1960 census was 42 percent Black
(the highest percentage of African-American residents in any U.S. state at the time)
but where Black people were so systematically denied the franchise that only 6
percent of the adult Black population was registered to vote.

SNCC had formed
in the wake of the 1960 sit-in demonstrations at lunch counters in Greensboro,
North Carolina and elsewhere in the South, where Blacks (mostly male college
students) sat in at whites-only lunch counters and demanded to be served. But
Robert Moses, the SNCC official in Mississippi who got the idea for Freedom
Summer and ran the project (and who next year briefly changed his name to
“Parris” because he didn’t want a cult of personality to form around him when
he did a similar project in Alabama), decided that for Blacks in Mississippi,
winning the right to participate in the political process was far more
important and immediate an issue than getting served crappy meals at the lunch
counters at Woolworth’s. Freedom Summer was a three-pronged approach that
included 1) having volunteers, both Black and white, go door-to-door and urge
people to go to the county courthouse to register to vote (the fact that
volunteer registrars couldn’t just sign people up then and there at their homes
itself shows how tightly the Mississippi state government and the whites who
ran it controlled the franchise to make sure the “wrong” people didn’t get to
vote!); 2) running “Freedom Schools” to teach African-American kids in
Mississippi their heritage, both in Africa and in the U.S. (I happened to read
one of the “Freedom School” history primers at age 11 and was grateful that it
inoculated me against the Columbia University school of thought about
Reconstruction that in the 1960’s was still being taught in mainstream public
schools as unchallengeable fact — this is the version, unforgettably dramatized
by D. W. Griffith in the film The Birth of a Nation, that held the Reconstruction governments in the
South were run by opportunistic “carpetbagger” whites and naïve, easily
manipulated Blacks until the native white Southerners rose up, cleaned house
and put the Blacks back “in their place”); and 3) organizing the Mississippi
Freedom Democratic Party to elect an alternative slate of delegates to the 1964
Democratic Party convention and challenge the right of the all-white mainstream
Mississippi delegation to sit at the convention. Considerable personal risk was
involved — the show’s Web site quotes a song from the period about going to
Mississippi that sounds like one of those stiff-upper-lip songs associated with
someone on his way to fight a war: “And if you never see me again/Remember that
I had to go.”

The risks were dramatized early on in the campaign when three
civil-rights workers who had gone to Neshoba County, Mississippi ahead of most
of the people in the project — Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, both
white; and James Chaney, Black — disappeared and were ultimately found murdered
(and their killers turned out to be the sheriff and deputy sheriff of Neshoba
County, a fact oddly unmentioned in this film, though it does cover the role of Michael Schwerner’s widow Rita in dramatizing
the case and spreading word about it in the media nationwide). The film shows
the famous shot of the three civil rights workers’ station wagon being pulled
out of the water — the car was discovered well before their bodies were — but
it treats their story, properly, as incidental to the overall saga of Freedom
Summer and what it did and didn’t accomplish. The filmmakers, director Stanley
Nelson (an African-American who has previously produced six other episodes of American
Experience, including one about the Freedom
Riders who sought to integrate interstate bus service in 1961-62 and also suffered personal jeopardy for their pains, and
who’s currently in post-production on a documentary about the pioneering woman
jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams) and his co-writer, Paul Taylor, showed a wide
range of interviewees — including quite a few clips of surviving members of
Freedom Summer that dramatically clash with the archival footage of what they
looked like 50 years ago —and also include some horrifying footage from “the
day” of the racists themselves, dripping with the weird combination of
patronization and hatred with which people who think they’re racially superior
to others justify those beliefs. One of the most dramatic sequences comes when
one of the white Mississippi officials starts talking about how he’s
particularly horrified at the white women who came down to work on Freedom Summer and how he can’t conceive of
any reason for a white woman to stay in the home of Black people except to have
sex with Black men — and we see him melt down and start sputtering and
stammering, until he reaches the point where he degenerates from a
comprehensible spokesperson for a contemptible point of view to a virtual
idiot, literally unable to put or
keep a sentence together. This is intercut with a horror story from a woman who
recalled being kidnapped by three white men who put a rope with a noose on it
around her neck, dragged her down, chanted loathsome slogans about her being a
“nigger-lover” and put her in abject fear of being lynched — and though they
let her go, she was so unnerved by the experience that she literally peed in her pants out of fear.

Freedom
Summer also goes into the ways white
Mississippians made sure Black Mississippians couldn’t vote; at a time when
many Black Mississippians lived on plantations and made their living
sharecropping, an attempt to register to vote meant almost certain eviction,
thereby depriving them of their livelihoods as well as rendering them homeless.
And for those who couldn’t be dissuaded, there were always arrests (often on
trumped-up charges) or out-and-out beatings. The film tells its chilling story
matter-of-factly (as I’ve seen from other documentaries by Stanley Nelson; he’s
the sort of filmmaker who stays out of the way, gives you the information and
lets the story tell itself, generating emotional outrage without the director
blatantly forcing it on you in the manner of Michael Moore and his imitators)
and leads up to an emotional climax with Fannie Lou Hamer’s intense testimony
before the Credentials Committee at the 1964 Democratic convention. Hamer gave
a wrenching account of how she personally had been forced off the plantation
where she lived, arrested and beaten for trying to register to vote in 1962 —
and President Lyndon Johnson was so outraged at being challenged that he called
a press conference to announce the nine-month anniversary of the assassination
of his predecessor, John F. Kennedy, just to get Hamer’s testimony off the
airwaves. It backfired; kept by Johnson’s press conference from broadcasting it
live, the networks showed it on film and Johnson’s weird attempt to suppress it
itself became a subject of nationwide debate. Though President Johnson did more
for civil rights and racial equality than anyone else in that office, before or
since, the show reveals his obsession with party decorum and order; his
paranoiac belief that Hamer was a stalking horse for Robert F. Kennedy, the
late president’s brother and still U.S. Attorney General at the time, whom
Johnson believed wanted to stage a scene at the convention so the delegates
would dump Johnson and nominate Kennedy; and his willingness to play the same
sort of hardball to block the Freedom Democratic Party’s challenge that the
Mississippi whites had used to deny Blacks the right to vote in the. first
place.

As documented by actual recordings of Johnson’s White House
conversations (contrary to popular belief Richard Nixon was not the first President to record White House
conversations — that began with Franklin Roosevelt, the first President to
serve once recording technology had developed enough to make it technically
possible — though Nixon was the
first, and probably still the only, President who had his office and phones
literally bugged so they recorded whether he consciously wanted them to or
not), Johnson interceded with United Auto Workers president Walter Reuther to
get Joe Rauh, the attorney for the UAW and also the legal representative of the
Freedom Democratic Party, essentially to sell them out or else lose the UAW as
a client. The result was that instead of unseating the 68 delegates from the
regular Mississippi Democratic Party — or getting the compromise they would have been willing to accept, which was a
half-and-half split (a fact I recall from the time that’s oddly unmentioned
here) — the Freedom Democratic Party was offered just two seats as
“delegates-at-large,” and they angrily (and unanimously) rejected this sop.
Director Nelson makes the interesting argument that it was the shabby treatment
of the Freedom Democratic Party’s challenge that broke the multiracial “beloved
community” of the first civil rights movement and sent the African-American
movement into the swamps of reverse racism represented by the “Black Power!”
slogan and the violent, incendiary rhetoric of the late 1960’s (though in
fairness the “Black Power!” groups were considerably less incendiary and
violent in practice than they were in their rhetoric), alienating whites and
leading to the racial polarization we’ve seen since (though the analysis above
is mine, not his!). The Freedom Democratic Party in general and Fannie Lou
Hamer’s testimony in particular also come off in Nelson’s film as a precursor
of the so-called “second-wave feminism” of the late 1960’s/early 1970’s (Susan
Brownmiller, who later became known as author of the book Against Our
Will: Men, Women and Rape, which made the
case that by terrorizing women and leaving them feeling restricted in their
ability to go out in certain places at certain times and dress in certain ways,
rapists were “the shock troops of the patriarchy,” was a Freedom Summer
volunteer and appears briefly in this film); Nelson makes the hope that the
women serving on the Democratic Convention’s Credentials Committee were much
more moved by Hamer’s story, and much more emotional about wanting to respond
to it, than the men.

Overall, Freedom Summer is quite a documentary, its low-keyed presentation
just adding to its historical persuasiveness, and its continuing relevance was
just underscored by a recent report from the Brennan Center for Justice at the
New York University School of Law (http://www.brennancenter.org/analysis/state-voting-2014).
Last year the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the
principal legislative legacy of Freedom Summer (the Freedom Summer volunteers
actually got very few people to register but they dramatized the issue
nationwide and led to the push that got the Voting Rights Act through Congress
and President Johnson to sign it), by eliminating the “pre-clearance”
requirement that had forced states with histories of discrimination against
people of color in voting to have all changes in their elections laws cleared
by the federal government to make sure they didn’t have the effect of
discriminating. Once this part of the law was thrown out by the Right-wing
majority of the current Supreme Court on the ground that it was historically
unnecessary, virtually all the states of the Old South that the law had been
directed at in the first place, as well as quite a few states (mostly in the
Midwest) that were under Republican control, rushed through restrictions on
people’s right to vote. “Since the 2010 election, new voting restrictions are
slated to be in place in 22 states,”
the Brennan Center report said. “Unless these
restrictions are blocked — and there are court challenges to laws in six of
those states — voters in nearly half the country could find it harder to cast a
ballot in the 2014 midterm election than they did in 2010. The new laws range
from photo ID requirements to early voting cutbacks to voter registration
restrictions. Partisanship and race were key factors in this movement. Most
restrictions passed through GOP-controlled legislatures and in states with
increases in minority turnout.” As Clarence Darrow said in his opening
statement at the Scopes trial (a legislative attack on the teaching of
evolution which, in different forms, is still going on!), “Ignorance and
fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating
for more.” Just because the party identification of the white Southern
establishment has changed from Democrat to Republican, and out-and-out racist
statements of the type seen in the archival clips in Freedom Summer are now de trop, that hasn’t lessened one bit the determination of
the Right, Northern as well as Southern, to restrict the franchise so only the
“right” people vote and phenomena like the presidency of the mixed-race but
Black-presenting Barack Obama are never allowed to happen again.

Tuesday, June 24, 2014

The film was High Pressure, a 1932 Warner Bros. comedy/drama on the same DVD as the one we’d
screened a couple of nights earlier, Private Detective 62 — and, much to my surprise, a considerably better
movie. High Pressure began life
as a Broadway play by Aben Kandel called Hot Money that opened in November 1931 and closed after just
nine performances; Warners grabbed the movie rights and filmed it with their
newly acquired actor, William Powell (grabbed from Paramount in a talent raid
that also bagged Ruth Chatterton and Kay Francis, though Powell wouldn’t
achieve true superstardom until Warners dropped him in 1934 and he ended up at
MGM, where he broke through with back-to-back mega-hits, Manhattan
Melodrama and The Thin Man), along with hotshot director Mervyn LeRoy and an
excellent supporting cast featuring at least one player outside the usual
Warner Bros. contract list, Evelyn Brent (more on her later). The wisecracking
screenplay was by Joseph Jackson and an uncredited S. J. Peters, and it begins
with Ginsburg (played as a well-to-do Jewish stereotype by George Sidney), a
money man who claims to have a contract with an inventor for a formula that
will make rubber out of sewage, hooking up with Mike Donahey (Frank McHugh at
his most Frank McHughiest) to promote the new invention. Donahey tells him that
the secret to success is to get the super-promoter Gar Evans (William Powell)
to organize the promotion and head the company formed to exploit the new process.
Unfortunately, Gar is just finishing up a five-day bender and Donahey has to
visit every speakeasy within walking distance of Gar’s home on 47th
Street in New York City just to find him, after which they have to spend five
days of workouts and steam baths just to leach the alcohol out of Gar and
return him to sobriety, coherence and business acumen. The trio launch the
Golden Gate Artificial Rubber Company after Gar convinces his new partners that
a) they should never mention the word “sewage” in connection with the process,
b) they should pick a corporate name with the word “gold” in it, and c)
Ginsburg should henceforth be referred to as “Colonel Ginsburg” because either
a military or a ministerial title is essential for the front man in this sort
of enterprise, and the alternative — “Reverend Ginsburg” — would be utterly
unbelievable attached to someone so stereotypically Jewish. (“Rabbi Ginsburg”
obviously wouldn’t have had the same ring, or been equally persuasive in
getting the goyim to invest in
the company.)

Once Gar is on board — for 51 percent of the enterprise — he
insists on spending $25,000 of Ginsburg’s money on an ultra-fancy office (I
think the floor of this was recycled from the big nightclub set in Al Jolson’s
1928 film The Singing Fool) and
starts taking orders for Golden Gate stock even though Ginsburg’s inventor has
disappeared and therefore there’s no one at the firm with any idea whether the
process actually works. Of course, this being a 1930’s movie, romantic
complications enter into things as well: Gar is in love with Francine Dale
(Evelyn Brent), whom he was dating and was, indeed, visiting at her apartment
when he abruptly told her he needed some Bromo-Seltzer and disappeared on a
five-day drinking binge instead. She doesn’t want to get involved with him only
to have him jilt her for another preposterous reason, but she agrees to sign on
to Golden Gate as their receptionist — only to get into hissy-fits of jealousy
when Gar hires secretary Helen Wilson (Evalyn Knapp, for once acting like a
human being instead of a mannequin), insists that she not have a boyfriend
(explaining that he doesn’t want to train a private secretary only to lose her
to matrimony) and tells her he’ll be working her late. Francine overhears this
and assumes the worst, but Helen couldn’t be less interested in Gar personally,
namely because she does have a
boyfriend, Jimmy Moore (John Wray), whom she was hoping to save enough money on
the job to marry. One interesting aspect of High Pressure is Brent’s almost viciously cold performance in this
role, a part that would have sent Bette Davis, fangs bared, out to chew the
scenery; before Josef von Sternberg discovered Marlene Dietrich, Brent had been
his favorite actress, and he had directed her much the way he did Dietrich: act
as emotionlessly as possible, feign total indifference to the events of the
story in general and the feelings of the male lead in particular, and affect an
icy world-weariness almost the opposite of the intensely engaged, emotionally
driven performances most of Warners’ female stars gave in the early 1930’s.
Brent really does seem like a
Sternberg heroine dropped into the middle of a shrieking Warners melodrama, and
her glacial intensity contrasts oddly with the typical hurly-burly of an
ordinary Warners film, especially one helmed by a fast-paced director like
LeRoy.

Early on it occurred to me that High Pressure could easily have been remade in the modern era,
with an Internet start-up instead of an industrial process as the product the
highly inflated “company” is supposed to be making — and about midway through
Charles and I both realized that the basic story had been remade recently as The Wolf of Wall
Street, with Leonardo Di Caprio in the
Powell role of the brilliant manipulator ultimately undone by his own
manipulations, both financial and romantic — though the two films end
dramatically differently in ways that reflect the various attitudes towards
money of the 1930’s and the 2010’s. In the wake of the 1929 Depression
audiences were highly skeptical
and even angry at characters like Gar Evans who exploited ordinary people to
make unethical killings in the markets, and so the writers of High
Pressure were careful to give Gar a
worm-turning scene in which, his company about to be shut down by the attorney
general and the Better Business Bureau, he sells out to the trust interests
controlling the natural rubber
industry and is able to wangle a deal by which all his stockholders are made
whole even though the rubber process itself is useless (he learns this when the
“expert” chemist who supposedly invented it turns out to have a “degree” from a
diploma mill Gar set up himself as one of his previous schemes), whereas Di
Caprio’s character in The Wolf of Wall Street couldn’t have cared less about the welfare of his
pigeons. The American economy collapsed in 1929 and led to an era in which
people openly questioned the whole idea of wealth and its concentration, and
many folks mobilized in the streets to demand programs aimed at helping the 99
percent; alas, the nearly as severe collapse of the economy in 2008 led not to a revival of progressivism but to a nation whose
citizens mostly continued their blind worship of money and people who have it,
and to a Tea Party movement aimed at making the rich even richer — reason
enough that the protagonist of The Wolf of Wall Street, unlike the one of High Pressure, could retain the audience’s sympathies even without giving back his ill-gotten gains!

Monday, June 23, 2014

Last night I watched the second showing (the night after the so-called
“world premiere”) of Lifetime’s latest “pussies in peril” genre piece, Stolen from the Womb — whose very title is a “spoiler.” It’s yet another
one about the Psycho Woman from Hell, who in this case is Chelsey Miller (Laura
Mennell), a dark-haired beauty who works as a real-estate agent and has a
husband, Jesse (the nicely hunky Corey Sevier), who owns a construction firm in
the town of Pineville in what’s pretty obviously Vancouver, British Columbia,
standing in for the U.S. Pacific Northwest. In the opening sequence Chelsey is
in the hospital at the end of a pregnancy, only the baby is stillborn (the
script by Vivian Rhodes and Jennifer Notas makes the usual confusion between a
miscarriage — a pregnancy that ends spontaneously before it goes full-term —
and a stillbirth, which is what we see here: the pregnancy runs the full term
and the baby is born, but is dead at birth). Then we get a “Two Years Later”
title and we eventually learn that Chelsey had two more pregnancies that went
wrong — miscarriages instead of stillbirths this time — and her doctors have
warned her that getting pregnant again will be dangerous for her health. Their failed attempts at reproduction have
so strained the Millers’ marriage that Jesse has moved out, but apparently
their last tumble in bed together produced at least a conception, and Chelsey
uses the promise of a baby at long last to win Jesse more or less back into the
relationship. She joins a pregnancy-training class headed by a yoga instructor
(Heather Feeney) — just why modern-day women are supposed to need so much training for something that’s a natural part of female life
and which women had been doing for hundreds of thousands of years pretty much
on their own before doctors came along and “medicalized” it is a mystery — and
there she meets the Good Girl, Diane King (Larisa Oleynik). She and her husband
Rob (Sebastian Spence, who played the Psycho from Hell himself in a previous
Lifetime movie, The Obsession, in
which he was a crazed ballet teacher trying to get in the pants of his underage
star student; he wasn’t particularly impressive in that role — I wrote in my
notes on that film that the part “needed tall, dark and handsome and got
sandy-haired, pasty-faced, buff but only moderately attractive” — but he was a
lot more interesting there than playing the gooder-than-good suburban husband
he is here) are expecting their
first child and hanging out a lot with her friend Paula, her husband and their children. (“Once you have one of your own, you won’t
spend so much time doting on mine,” a rather exasperated Paula tells Diane.)

Chelsey and Diana befriend each other at the yoga class, but Chelsey doesn’t
stay pregnant very long: she has yet another miscarriage, but she starts padding herself out (the
scene in which she abandons the cushion she’s been using for this purpose and
puts on the medical prosthesis she’s ordered to make it more convincing is one
of the most chilling in the film), continues to pass herself off as pregnant,
and hatches a nasty and malignant plot: bereft of a fetus of her own, she’s
going to kidnap Diane just as Diane is about to give birth and claim Diane’s
baby as hers. Alas, though that only happens in the last half-hour of this film
and is supposed to be a Big Surprise,
Lifetime’s promos (and indeed the title itself) gave it away big-time and left
the audience (this audience, anyway) sitting rather impatiently through the
intervening parts of the movie, blowing what was supposed to be a slow,
suspenseful buildup in the Rhodes-Notas script and Terry Ingram’s workmanlike
but uninspired direction and wondering, “When is Chelsey going to kidnap Diane
already?” The last half-hour at least is appropriately chilling — Chelsey drugs
Diane at a roadside café (and leaves Diane’s cell phone there, which makes it
absurdly easy for her husband and the cops to trace her) and takes her to a
deserted house in Brewster, a five-hour drive from Pineville (Chelsey knew it
would be deserted because the company she works for was trying to rent it out).
When Diane comes to, Chelsey has strapped her to a bed in a classic bondage
pose and is ready to help her deliver her baby — she’s got a bunch of medical
tools at the foot of the bed and plans a D.I.Y. delivery — only Diane convinces
Chelsey (truthfully) that the baby developed a hernia while in Diane’s womb and
the doctors had planned to do a C-section and operate on the kid as soon as
they “untimely ripped” him from mom’s body. Thinking she can pass herself off
as a woman who’s just given birth, Chelsey smears some of Diane’s blood between
her own legs and takes the baby (a boy Diane and Rob were planning to name
Johnny — after Johnny Appleseed[1]
— but Chelsey wanted to name Alexander, after her stillborn daughter Alexandra)
to the hospital — where, by sheer coincidence (or authorial fiat), Diane has
also been taken after a neighbor taking out his garbage, heard her screaming,
called 911 and thereby made it possible for Rob and the police to rescue her.
Eventually Chelsey is sedated and taken into custody, the baby boy is operated
on and Diane finally gets her
child back — while the final scene is Chelsey in a mental ward (obviously the
justice system has decided she’s too bonkers to stand trial for kidnapping),
holding a doll and talking to it as if it were a real-life baby.

Stolen
from the Womb probably wouldn’t seem so
mediocre if Lifetime hadn’t done a far better film on the same theme eight
years ago: that one was called Cries in the Dark and, despite the rather generic horror-thriller
title, came off as far superior. Though Cries in the Dark is considerably more gruesome than Stolen
from the Womb — its writer, Kraig Wenman,
actually had the bad girl murder
the expectant mom and literally
steal her baby from the womb (it was established that the villainess in that
one was a dental hygenist and had learned enough to do D.I.Y. surgery) — it was
also a far more exciting thriller, excellently directed by Paul Schneider and
with stellar performances from Eve LaRue Callahan as the victim’s sister, a
cop; and Adrian Holmes as her police partner, a drop-dead gorgeous
African-American detective named Darrell Wynn. (I posted a review of Cries
in the Dark to imdb.com and pleaded with
Dick Wolf to hire Holmes as Christopher Meloni’s replacement if and when Meloni
left Law and Order: Special Victims Unit — alas, Wolf wasn’t listening and instead hired the unspeakably awful
Danny Pino for the role!) Next to Cries in the Dark, Stolen from the
Womb is a lot more flat and ordinary,
sucking up to the usual Lifetime clichés instead of transcending them — and
with one rather odd bit of typecasting that rankled me a bit. Remember how in
the old “B” Westerns the good guys wore the white hats and rode the white horses,
while the bad guys wore the black hats and rode the black horses? Well, in Stolen
from the Womb — as in a lot of other
Lifetime movies — the good girl is blonde and the bad girl is dark-haired. To
the extent that anything redeems Stolen
from the Womb, it’s Laura Mennell’s cool
performance as the psycho — writers Rhodes and Notas help the actress out by
not making her too evil too soon,
allowing her to seem sympathetic and also keeping her sufficiently in control
that she can still do her job and perform effectively at work (all too many
movie psychos act so flamboyantly “off” one wonders how they can keep a job!)
even while manipulating the people around her. But it’s the sort of actor’s
triumph that makes one wish Laura Mennell would get either a sympathetic role
or at least a more interesting, complicated villain in her next film!

[1]— A private joke between them: they learned the gender
of their baby-to-be at the stage in pregnancy when the fetus is the size of an
appleseed, and thereby nicknamed him “Johnny” — which stuck.

After Stolen from the Womb I watched the next episode of Agatha Christie’s Poirot — to give the series its full official title — on
KPBS, and according to imdb.com this episode, “The Clocks,” was actually shown before the one they ran last week, “Three Act Murder.” It
was also considerably better; based on a book Christie wrote either during the
early days of World War II or just before that — at a time when, at least
according to this story, the prospect of another brutal war between Britain and
Germany was a hot topic of discussion in the drawing rooms and on the streets
of the U.K. — “The Clocks” is a considerably more resonant story than most of
Christie’s mechanical concoctions. Lt. Colin Race (Tom Burke) is an agent of
MI6 (the “MI” stands for “Military Intelligence” and MI6, which is usually
involved in actual espionage, is generally considered the British equivalent of
the CIA — while MI5, which deals with counter-intelligence, is sort of the
British FBI), though this story has him basically doing MI5’s work: trying to
ferret out a German “mole” inside the British secret service. He learns who the
“mole” is but loses track of him when the “mole” kills Race’s girlfriend, Fiona
Hanbury (Anna Skellern, who gets an awful lot of screen time for a character
that’s killed in the first few minutes — thanks to Colin doing an awful lot of
flashbacking about her). A blind woman named Miss Pebmarsh (Anna Massey), who
works at a photography studio (I’m not making this up, you know!), stumbles
across a dead body in her living room right after the arrival of Sheila Webb
(Jaime Winstone), a secretary from Miss Martindale’s (Lesley Sharp) temp
agency, who was summoned and told that Miss Pebmarch had specifically requested
her services, where the real Miss Pebmarch had not only not requested a
secretary but had never heard of Sheila Webb. The usual stupid police, headed
by Inspector Hardcastle (Phil Daniels) and his sidekick, Constable Jenkins (Ben
Righton), immediately jump to the conclusion that Sheila was the killer, and
that she impersonated Miss Pebmarch and placed the call to Miss Martindale so
she’d have a quasi-legitimate reason to be at the murder scene.

Fortunately
Hercule Poirot (who in this episode, even more than in most, is quick to
correct people who refer to him as French — he was Belgian and Christie made
him a retired officer with the Belgian police), played (as usual in this
series) by David Suchet, is on the scene. Lt. Colin Race, the MI6 agent, is
immediately smitten with Sheila Webb and convinced a) that she didn’t kill the
man (whoever he was) and b) that the murder is somehow linked to the spy ring
he’s investigating. The cops, of course, are equally convinced that Lt. Race is
thinking with his dick and Sheila is
the killer — and the evidence mounts up against her, including the four
non-working clocks, all set to 4:13 p.m., that were found on the murder scene
along with the cuckoo clock that was the only one on Miss Pebmarch’s premises
that she actually owned. A coroner’s inquest is held and another woman, Nora
Brent (Sinead Keenan), calls the police after it’s over and says, “She was
lying,” then is herself knocked off — the police, once again, assume she means
Sheila, especially since one of the clocks was formerly her property, a gift
from her mom with the name “Rosemary” on it (that was actually her original
given name but she chose to use her middle name, Sheila, instead). Suspicion
also falls on a pair of rather bookish intellectuals, a brother and sister
named Matthew (Guy Henry) and Rachel (Abigail Thaw) Waterhouse, especially when
Poirot deduces from their speech patterns that they are German, but when he
asks them what they’re doing in England they make the chilling reply, “Wir
sind Juden” — they’re Jewish refugees from
the Nazis who took non-Jewish Anglo-sounding names because anti-Semitism wasn’t
(and indeed isn’t) confined to Nazi Germany. Poirot and Lt. Race discover the
German spies — an upper-class couple who are deliberately conspiring to pass
secrets to the Nazis to keep Britain weak and thereby subservient to Germany
instead of getting involved in a war that will lead to even more casualties
than the Great War (which is what World War I was usually called before there
was a World War II) — but Lt. Race turns out to be wrong about the mysterious
murder at Miss Pebmarch’s having a connection with the spies; instead its cast
of characters turn out to have more prosaic motives than that. (Though I just
watched this show last night I can’t for the life of me remember whodunit,
except that it was a middle-aged man who was unveiled as the killer after
Poirot briefly suspected Miss Pebmarch.)

I liked “The Clocks” considerably
better than “Three Act Tragedy,” the Poirot episode KBPS had shown the previous weekend (though
in the original British run of the series “The Clocks” came first), partly
because it seemed to have more story depth — the subplot about pro-Nazi English
people spying for the Germans gave it more dramatic interest than Christie’s
puzzle-box murder plots usually had — and partly because it seemed to have more
genuine emotion: the oddly diffident relationship between Lt. Race and Sheila
(hampered not only because he’s on the rebound from his dead fiancée but
because she’s been, in the argot
of the time, a “loose” woman, having a sexual affair with a professor who
engaged her as a secretary and made her his lover as well, as well as other
casual relationships), the honestly and emotionally depicted plight of the
Waterhouses, and the disgusting rationalizations offered by the people who
actually turn out to be the Nazi spies all add muscle and sinew to the bones of
an otherwise rather typical Christie plot. Raymond Chandler generally couldn’t
stand Agatha Christie’s work — she was the sort of mystery writer he was
talking about when he praised Dashiell Hammett for giving “murder back to the
people who commit it for reasons, not merely to provide a corpse” — but at
least in this story the murders are
committed for reasons, and Christie’s insertion of some of her real life (like
the real Christie, the fictitious Miss Pebmarsh served as a volunteer nurse on
the front in World War I — the recent Extraordinary Women episode on Christie said that work gave her an in-depth
knowledge of poisons which figured extensively in her novels, including this
one: the mystery victim is killed by stabbing, but an autopsy later reveals he
was drugged with chloral hydrate before he was stabbed) also adds to the quirky
appeal of “The Clocks.”

Sunday, June 22, 2014

The film Charles and I finally watched last night was Private
Detective 62, an intriguing entry from the
unhappy two years (1932-34) William Powell spent under contract to Warner Bros.
After making his film debut for the Goldwyn company in the 1922 Sherlock
Holmes, Powell ended up at Paramount in the
later silent era (in Josef von Sternberg’s The Last Command from 1928 he plays a former Russian revolutionary
who emigrates to Hollywood and becomes a director, makes a movie about the
Russian Revolution and hires a former Czarist general, played by star Emil
Jannings, to portray a Czarist general in his film) and made the transition to
talkies there. Then in 1932 Jack Warner decided to stage a major talent raid on
Paramount’s roster and came back with Powell, Ruth Chatterton and Kay Francis.
Chatterton made some interesting movies (including the bizarre Female, in which she’s a woman who inherits her dad’s auto
company and outfits her home to facilitate her one-night seductions of hapless
employees) but was getting too old for major stardom — though in 1936, after
Warners released her, she’d make a major comeback as Walter Huston’s shrewish
wife in Dodsworth. Francis stuck
to her contract to the bitter end, making all the crappy scripts Jack Warner
and Hal Wallis gave her until her term (in more ways than one) expired in 1939.
Powell spent two years at the studio, trying as best he could to fit his
debonair acting style into the Warners machine, but didn’t produce any
blockbuster hits. When Warners released him the best his agent could do for him
was get an offer from Columbia. “Keep trying,” Powell told his agent, and the
agent managed to use Columbia’s interest to get Powell a contract with the
grandest studio of all, MGM, where he had back-to-back hits, Manhattan
Melodrama and The Thin Man, and got back on the “A”-list with a vengeance.
Directed quite stylishly by Michael Curtiz — who was still using some of the
trick angles and oblique compositions he’d learned in his native Hungary before
being brought over to the U.S. (by Jack Warner and Darryl Zanuck, who had seen
his Biblical movie Moon of Israel
and decided he’d be the perfect director for their big-budget late-silent
production of Noah’s Ark) — from
a script by Rian James based on a story by Raoul Whitfield, Private
Detective 62 opens in Paris, where U.S.
government agent Donald Free (William Powell) is being given instructions by
his controller that he’s going to have to break into a French government office
and steal some important papers.

Just why the U.S. needs to steal government secrets from France, a country we
were still more or less allied with in 1933, is never explained, but the
inevitable happens, Free is caught, he’s tried (in a French court in which,
praise be, everyone actually speaks French instead of bad French-accented
English!) and sentenced to deportation aboard a steamer with no other human
passengers — only just as the steamer is about to land in New York Free is told
by its captain that he’s not
going home: instead he’s going to be put on another steamer and taken right back to France to be
punished further. Free leaps off the deck (no doubt the actual dive was done by
a stunt double) and swims ashore, then runs into a young woman and her lover,
hiding out in his flat from a jealous husband who’s hired incompetent private
detective Dan J. Hogan (Arthur Hohl) to follow her and catch her and her
boyfriend in flagrante delicto
(or as close to it as a mainstream Hollywood film, even in the so-called
“pre-Code” period of loose Production Code enforcement, could come) — only
Free, hiding out in the house, emerges, says he owns the place, the guy is his
roommate and nothing untoward is going on between his roommate and the woman.
There follows a typical montage
sequence of Free finding himself unable to land a job or hold on to the hotel
room where he’s actually staying in the middle of the Depression — the words “No Help Wanted” hang heavy over these
scenes and take on a sinister aspect of their own — until Free finds the old
card Hogan gave him for his Peerless Detective Agency, pretends to be Hogan and
bluffs his way into a job. The job is for Harcourt Burns (Hobart Cavanaugh),
who wants them to follow his wife Helen (the marvelous Natalie Moorhead, who
isn’t given anything like the amount of screen time she deserves) and catch her
having an affair — only Hogan and his assistant Whitey (James Bell) take the
case from Free and end up breaking into Mrs. Burns’ hotel room in Atlantic
City, where they indeed find her with a man … Mr. Burns. The Peerless agency is saved when Hogan cuts
a deal with gangster and gambler Tony Bandor (Gordon Westcott), in which
(anticipating the plot of Criminal Lawyer by 18 years) Hogan agrees to do all Bandor’s P.I. work in exchange for
a cut of the take from his enterprises, legal and otherwise.

Bandor assigns
Peerless to investigate Janet Reynolds (Margaret Lindsay), a glacial beauty
who’s winning big at Bandor’s casino night after night — I was expecting it
would turn out she was cheating, using some sort of mechanical or electrical
device to get the ball to land in the wheel in places that would win for her,
but no such explanation occurred — and Bandor wants her scared off and dealt
with however possible. Free’s strategy is to date Janet — only, of course, this
being a movie he falls genuinely in love with her — and when Janet, on her way
to Europe, demands that she be paid off now, Bandor and Hogan hatch a strategy
to stop her. A casino employee (whom we never see enough of to identify) slips
her miniature gun out of her purse and carefully cuts the bullets open so
they’re turned into blank shells, then reloads the gun and returns it to her —
so she’s carrying a harmless weapon but doesn’t know that. She confronts
Bandor, who provokes her to shoot him — which she does, and he falls to the
floor and makes it look like she’s killed him. She flees in a panic and asks
Free to help, and meanwhile another
assailant sneaks into Bandor’s room and shoots him for real. Free falls off the
wagon big-time and does about five days’ worth of heavy drinking (now it was beginning to look like a William Powell
detective movie!) before pulling himself together, figuring out the scheme and
getting the key piece of information from Whitey, whose nervous, sniffling
behavior marked him as a cocaine addict and whose drug of choice is at least
twice referred to as “snow” (and once as “hop,” a slang term which generally
referred to heroin), an electrifyingly frank reference to drugs even for a
“pre-Code” film! The whole thing was a plot between Hogan and Bandor’s
principal rival, Valentini, to off Bandor and frame Janet for the crime;
instead Free and his honest and long-suffering secretary Amy Moran (a nice
supporting performance by Ruth Donnelly) are the only ones not taken into custody when the cops raid Peerless and
arrest Hogan. Free is reinstated by that mysterious and unnamed government
agency that was employing him in the first reel, and Janet wants to marry him —
“Are you proposing to me?” he
asks incredulously — and though he warns her that his new/old job is going to
require him to be away a lot, they agree to tie the knot anyway and drive off
together as the film fades out.

Private Detective 62 qualifies as proto-noir (and of course Curtiz would direct some of Warners’
best films noir, notably Mildred
Pierce), though as Charles pointed out
there are surprisingly few noir
movies about corrupt private
detectives (one of the rare examples is the 1949 film Manhandled, with Dan Duryea as the bad P.I.), and though the
moral attitudes behind this film aren’t as ambiguous as they would be in
classic noir (or in other
contemporary proto-noirs like Safe
in Hell and Sensation Hunters) it’s certainly an engaging movie. Charles caught a
resemblance between Private Detective 62 and the current USA Network series Burn Notice — a spy who was “burned,” disowned by the intelligence
agency that had employed him, and had to support himself with odd jobs to
survive — and though it’s unclear exactly what William Powell’s character was doing at the
beginning of the film or who he was doing it for (the U.S. didn’t have an intelligence agency between the two world wars —
the State Department had opened a “black office” to read enemy codes during
World War I but it was shut down in 1923 with the pious argument, “Gentlemen do
not read other gentlemen’s secret communications” — and most synopses of the
film refer to Powell as a “diplomat”), it gives his character an engagingly
dark and unscrupulous background that makes his actions as the Peerless
vice-president in the main part of the movie believable. At the same time his
former government employment gives Powell’s character a sense of ethics no one
else at Peerless (except the secretary) shares, and thus adds to the dramatic
tension that makes this film appealing and quite a bit better than the common
run of Powell’s Warners vehicles (though by far the best film he made in this
period was the tear-jerker One Way Passage, in which he’s an ex-con being extradited to face execution, Kay
Francis is an heiress with a fatal disease, and the two have a doomed romance
on board a ship — years later Francis would regularly call her friends whenever
One Way Passage was being shown
on TV, and they recalled it was the one film out of her whole oeuvre of which she was genuinely proud).

Saturday, June 21, 2014

The film was Petals on the Wind, based on the late Gothic novelist V. C. Andrews’
sequel to her mega-best seller Flowers in the Attic. I already posted about the Lifetime TV-movie
adaptation of Flowers in the Attic,
to which this is a sequel, and explained Andrews’ intriguing background as a
writer: she’d originally been a commercial artist but took up writing as a
hobby in her early 50’s and managed to crank out a number of cycles of
interlocking stories — all structured as five-book series, including an initial
volume, three sequels and a final prequel — before her death. Needless to say,
her publisher decided the name “V. C. Andrews” was too valuable a property to
let expire with the demise of its original owner, so they hired another writer,
Andrew Neiderman, to keep writing “V. C. Andrews” novels, ostensibly based on
notes the original Andrews had left behind but, not surprisingly, drawing more
and more on Neiderman’s own inventions (or at least his own deployments of
Gothic clichés) as the work progressed and Andrews’ own collections of notes,
jottings, outlines or whatever dried up. Flowers in the Attic was first published in 1979 and was such an enormous
hit it not only spawned four more books in the series about the terminally
dysfunctional Dollanganger family (as I noted earlier, Andrews seems to have
inherited from fellow woman Gothic author Mignon G. Eberhardt a penchant for
unwittingly — at least I hope it
was unwittingly — silly character names). In the backstory, Corinne Foxworth
Dollanganger Winslow (Heather Graham) married her father’s half-brother and
produced four children whom Corinne’s own mother Olivia (Ellen Burstyn, giving
an old-pro-showing-the-young-whippersnapers-what-acting-really-is performance in both films), the only member of
this family whose given name does not begin with “C,” denounced as “spawn of the devil” because of their
incestuous lineage. Corrine and her half-uncle break up (either that or he
dies) and she remarries, and her new husband raises the kids as his own, but at
the start of Flowers in the Attic
he’s killed in a car crash and Corrine, in order to win back her family
inheritance, not only has to move to the old manse — Foxworth Hall, Virginia — but has to pretend that
she has no children. So she and Olivia have them hide in one bedroom of the house and give them access to the
attic in which to play — and the kids draw flowers on the wall to nurture the
fantasy that they are outside.

Flowers is about how the kids grow up (or don’t) during this period: little
brother Cory (Maxwell Kovach) dies of pneumonia, his sister Carrie (Ava Telek
in Flowers, Bailey Buntain in Petals) gets developmentally stunted so she never grows up
psychologically or emotionally, and the oldest kids, fraternal twins
Christopher (the drop-dead gorgeous Mason Dye in Flowers and the almost as hot Wyatt Nash in Petals) and Cathy (Kiernan Shipka in Flowers, Rose McIver in Petals), end up having a hot and heavy sexual affair with
each other, not surprisingly since they’re reaching sexual maturity in a
hothouse environment where they literally don’t have access to anyone else their own age. In Flowers the kids first assume that mom is on their side
against their Grandma from Hell, but soon they realize that Corinne wants to
keep them in the attic so she can marry her current boyfriend, attorney Bart
Winslow (Dylan Bruce), who thinks she’s younger than she is and doesn’t realize
she has four children, two of whom are almost grown. Eventually the kids
realize what they’re up against after mom tries to off them by baking them
cakes laced with rat poison, and they finally escape from the attic and the
grounds of Foxworth Hall itself. Flowers ends with them on a bus to heaven knows where, and Petals opens a decade later. It turns out that the three
remaining Dollanganger kids were adopted by a Dr. Paul Sheffield in North
Carolina, who did his best to provide them a loving and nurturing environment
(and also gave them a considerably less risible last name!), and Christopher
was inspired by his adoptive dad’s example to go to medical school and become a
doctor himself. Only Dr. Paul Sheffield dies just before Christopher is about
to graduate, and Petals opens at
his funeral; Christopher is about to join the staff of the local hospital and
marry the boss’s airheaded daughter, Sarah Reeves (Whitney Hoy) — though the name
more often than not comes out as “Sierra” on the soundtrack — when his plans
get monkey-wrenched by Cathy.

It’s not quite certain who seduces whom, but they
get their incestuous goings-on back together again even with alternative
partners in their lives — Sarah in his and New York ballet dancer Julian
Marquet (Will Kemp) in hers. It seems that Cathy has been taking ballet classes
and Julian saw her, immediately fell in lust with her, and determined to get
her to run away with him, join his ballet company (he’s the star dancer and he
boasts that the company director is “in love with me,” which suggests that
they’re Gay partners and he’s cheating on the director with women) and become
an instant star. Only he turns out to be a thoroughly nasty piece of sexually
exploitative trash, deliberately costing her a big role by dropping her during
a rehearsal — and she blackmails him into putting ground glass into the ballet
slippers of her rival, thereby getting the role back. Alas, things go sour when
Christopher and Carrie come to New York for her opening, Cathy catches Julian
putting the moves on Carrie, there’s a big freak-out and it ends up in a car
accident in which Julian is killed and Cathy almost dies too — but she’s saved
and so is Jory (Alex Salomon), the son she and Julian conceived before he
croaked but who hadn’t been born yet when his dad died. The three return to
North Carolina and Carrie resumes her education at a sort of finishing school
in which she’s being unmercifully teased as a “freak” by two fellow students,
who make fun of her for still carrying a doll (the only souvenir she still has
of her mother, she explains); they grab the doll, hang it from a mock noose in
the school’s third-floor storage room and lock her in — thereby, of course, flashing
her straight back to that attic where she spent most of her childhood.
Eventually Carrie meets a minister, Alex Conroy (Ross Phillips), and though
he’s supposed to be seriously in love with her (even though he’s more than
twice her age) director Karen Moncrieff (replacing Flowers director Deborah Chow — neither of these movies is
going to advance the cause of equality for women directors in Hollywood) is
unable to shoot the scene without making Alex look like yet another scumbag
licking his lips in anticipation of molesting and deflowering Carrie.

They get
formally engaged and Carrie seeks out their mom, who’s still living in Foxworth
Hall with her attorney husband and having the place obsessively remodeled again
and again to remove the “damned spots” the way Lady Macbeth kept washing her
hands. Carrie has regularly written mom, only to have the letters come back
marked “Return to Sender,” and when she gives mom the invitation to her wedding
mom coldly brushes her off and says, “You must be mistaken. I don’t have a
daughter.” Crushed by this final rejection, Carrie makes a batch of cakes laced
with rat poison, and instead of delivering them to mom and killing her with them — which is naturally where I thought this
was going — she uses them to commit suicide. Cathy decides to avenge herself
against her mom for his sister’s death, and the way she decides to go about
this is to seduce her stepfather Bart, then go to the big Christmas party at
Foxworth Hall, “out” herself as the offspring of Corinne and ultimately burn
the place down with her grandmother Olivia (ya remember Olivia?) in it. (Needless to say, the fire is staged in a
way that shows Moncrieff saw Rebecca
at least once in her life.) Cathy also gets it on with Christopher again and the two are caught by Sarah, which ends both
Christopher’s engagement and his hopes for a medical career in North Carolina,
so Petals end with the incestuous
pair living in California with Cathy’s two kids, Jory and Bart (her stepdad
impregnated her and she named their son after him), posing as husband and wife
and passing themselves off as a perfectly normal suburban family; while the
final scene shows mother Corinne in the main room of an old-style snake-pit
mental hospital, wearing a blue hospital gown and babbling incoherently about
her kids. I’ve gone into such detail about what actually happens in Petals on the Wind because whatever entertainment value it has is
dependent on the piling on of ridiculously improbable event on top of
ridiculously improbable event — next to this insane sequel, Flowers
in the Attic looks like a masterpiece of
hard-edged realism by comparison. There are other defects — like Heather Graham
barely looking any older than her on-screen daughter Rose McIver —but those are
the stuff of normal moviemaking.

Petals on the Wind is the product of the seriously warped mind of V. C.
Andrews — though whether she was really as crazy as this story makes her sound
or was a keen manipulator who had an excellent sense of what her audience
wanted and a willingness to give it to them, whether or not it made sense, is a
pretty open question — and what appeal it has is due to the sheer bizarreness
of it and the ability of its actors to keep straight faces while enacting all
this garbage. Aside from Burstyn’s three scenes as the old woman, bald and
trapped in her bed in the upstairs bedroom of Foxworth Hall (where she had the
children locked up lo those many years ago) and dependent on her daughter, who
sends away the visiting nurse (an African-American who’s just about the only
rational character in the entire film), says she’ll take care of her mom
herself, and of course sadistically neglects her instead, the acting here is
coolly competent rather than inspired, though at least there’s a lot of
soft-core porn and Wyatt Nash, though hardly as hot as Mason Dye (who played
his role in the earlier film), is at least good-looking enough it’s a delight
to see him screw his “sister” on screen in some pretty explicit scenes for a
mainstream cable-TV movie! Incidentally I should also mention that there’s a
brief reference to the child Christopher and Cathy conceived themselves in the
attic — there’s a tossed-off line about how she thinks it’s just as well she
miscarried that pregnancy, and I wanted him to say, “Just think — if that baby
had been born he could have grown up to be a great hero, killed a dragon, got
the one ring of power, crossed through the magic fire to get to his girlfriend
— who, by the way, was also his aunt — and ultimately got killed by his
foster-father’s nephew, which would have triggered the end of the world — oops,
wrong story.”

Wednesday, June 18, 2014

The Belle of New York
is a 1952 MGM musical, directed by Charles Walters and starring Fred Astaire as
a playboy in 1890’s New York and Vera-Ellen as a pretty rescue-mission
proprietor with whom he finally finds true love (Anita Ellis was her voice
double, since she could dance but not sing). It’s not one of Astaire’s really
great films, but it does have a
nice charm, with a pleasant score by Harry Warren and Johnny Mercer and some
really good comic supporting performances by Marjorie Main as Astaire’s rich aunt
(who has control of him by the purse strings) and Alice Pearce (as the drummer
in Vera-Ellen’s mission band). — 1/20/96

•••••

The film was The Belle of New York, a 1952 musical from MGM (Arthur Freed produced)
starring Fred Astaire and Vera-Ellen in a very loose adaptation of an old stage show that had been
an enormous hit in the 1890’s in both New York and London. But the only thing
the writers — Chester Erskine (“adaptation”), Robert O’Brien and Irving Elinson
— kept from the old show was the female lead, Angela Bonfils (Vera-Ellen),
who’s grown up in the “Daughters of Right” ministry where she works under the
direction of rich do-gooder Mrs. Phineas Hill (Marjorie Main). Hill’s
scapegrace playboy nephew Charlie (Fred Astaire) runs into Angela while she’s
on the street banging the drum in the mission band and is instantly smitten
with her — though he’s got six previous fiancées, all of whom he’s paid off,
the last of whom is a crack shot in a circus who bills herself as Dixie
“Deadshot” McCoy (Gale Robbins, whose part was hardly big enough — frankly I
was hoping for a scene in which this character threatens to shoot up Charlie’s
and Angela’s wedding — am I really
springing any surprises on you when I note that the two ill-matched lovers get
together at the end?). Arthur Freed had had this one on his production schedule
since 1946, when he’d planned it for Astaire and Judy Garland — but he could
never get them together at the same time, and when he finally did it was to
make Easter Parade (with Astaire a
last-minute substitute for Gene Kelly, who’d injured himself playing touch
football) instead.

Then in 1950 the stage show Guys and Dolls opened on Broadway and was an enormous hit, and
Freed got the greenlight for a similar story involving a nice mission girl and
a ne’er-do-well but charismatic man from the dark side (or as dark as a
Production Code-era musical was allowed to get). The Belle of New
York, stylishly directed by Charles Walters
(though one can’t help but imagine what Vincente Minnelli could have done with
this script!) and with a good score by Harry Warren and Johnny Mercer that
didn’t generate any standards (the best song, “I Wanna Be a Dancin’ Man,” was
obviously too tailored for Fred
Astaire to work for anyone else!), tends to be a forgotten stepchild among
Astaire’s movies even though it has one of his most audacious dance inventions.
Wondering how on earth he was going to top his gravity-defying
around-the-walls-of-a-room dance to “You’re All the World to Me” in Royal
Wedding, his immediately previous film,
Astaire concocted the idea of doing a dance solo in mid-air — or at least on a
pane of thick glass (thick enough to support his weight, thin enough so a
camera could shoot through it and the lights wouldn’t reflect off it) that
could be suspended above a painted backdrop to make it look like he was dancing in mid-air. To add to the irony,
the song he did this physically impossible but utterly joyous dance to was
called “Seeing’s Believing”! (Some of the shots of Astaire and, later, Vera-Ellen
floating in space were done with process work as well; MGM’s usual effects
people, Warren Newcombe and Irving Ries, really did a beautiful job on this.)

Otherwise it’s a comfortable movie, with Astaire once again using the device
that made his films with Ginger Rogers so deliciously entertaining — they’d
hate each other until he somehow got his leading lady on the dance floor with
him, whereupon the sheer romantic sensation of them dancing together would
dissolve her resistance and get her to fall in love with him — only the two
stars get together with over half an hour of this 82-minute film still to go
and the writers have to work overtime to plug in enough complications to keep
the film going longer than that. (They do that with a scene in which Vera-Ellen’s
lumpen friends come to Astaire’s
palatial home and insist that he drink toast after toast to her charms — and he
gets drunk and so hung over the next day he misses their scheduled wedding.)
The plot of this one is even more pretextual than usual for an Astaire musical,
but the numbers are so delightful, who cares? According to Robert Osborne’s
intro (this wasn’t included in TCM’s “Star of the Month” tribute to Astaire but
it was shown there later as one
of the “Bob’s Picks” nights), 40 percent of this film consists of singing
and/or dancing — a much higher percentage than usual in an Astaire musical
(Arlene Croce noted that just 10 of The Gay Divorcée’s 107 minutes were devoted to Astaire dancing alone
or with Ginger Rogers, then said, “The film’s enduring popularity is a
testament to what those minutes contain”) — including big numbers about Currier
and Ives (they kept the turn-of-the-last-century time setting) and Astaire’s
tribute to a horse pulling a streetcar (the song was called “Oops” and is just
about the only piece in The Belle of New York that got a cover version — Louis Armstrong recorded
it for Decca). While one can imagine the heartbreak Judy Garland could have
brought to this character (she was nowhere near as good a dancer as Vera-Ellen
but at least she could sing — Vera-Ellen’s voice had to be dubbed — and she was
a far better and more inspiring actress), as it stands The Belle of
New York is one of Astaire’s more engaging
movies, not one of his very best but certainly entertaining — and the “Dancin’
Man” solo is a virtual compendium of what “Fred Astaire” — dancer, singer,
actor, personality, star — was all about! — 6/18/14